Current projections show it will take us 26 years to close the gender pay gap in Australia.

To put that into perspective, it means we won’t see men and women in Australia earning the same money each week until a 14-year-old girl today is 40 years old. By then she would already be nearly half-way through her working life.

We’ve known for a long time that more action is needed. And it looks like we are finally seeing some policy shifts at the national level to help make it happen.

In the first parliamentary sitting week of 2023, the federal government introduced the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023, which will mandate that companies with more than 100 employees disclose their gender pay gaps publicly.

The legislation aims to increase transparency in the private sector, so that gender pay gap data is readily available for all to see. Until now, it’s been difficult to establish which sectors and companies have the biggest gaps in women and men’s earnings.

The data will be published by the government on the Workplace Gender Equality Agency website from 2024.

At the moment, Australia’s gender pay gap sits at just over 14 per cent, representing the average difference in weekly earnings between men and women employed full-time.

“The gender pay gap is also holding our economy back with $51.8 billion a year lost when it comes to women’s pay,” Minister for Women, Senator Katy Gallagher said on the day the legislation was introduced to parliament.

“The bill will also reduce red tape for businesses making it easier to report.”

We need to take an intersectional approach
While the new legislation is an essential step we must take to improve transparency and improve women’s financial security, it’s important to acknowledge that some groups of women in Australia face a much larger disparity in their earnings.

Indeed, we have a much greater intersectional pay gap, that sees women of colour, First Nations women, women with disability and those from the LGBTQIA+ community earn less than other women.

To date, we don’t have any data that shows us how big these gaps are, because there is no official process in place to collect this information.

Founder and Managing Director of Women of Colour Australia, Brenda Gaddi, has highlighted the need for us to start focusing on more than just gender when it comes to the pay gap.

She says the new legislation is “welcome” but ultimately short-sighted, leaving many women behind.

“While it is a breakthrough for Australia, the government fails to address the intersectional pay gap that exists and persists in this country,” Gaddi explains. 

“The various factors that contribute to the gender pay gap including discriminatory pay decisions, gender segregated industries, female dominated industries attracting lower pay and women’s high rates of unpaid labour are dismissed and downplayed.

“There is a big financial disparity that keeps women with intersecting identities, including First Nations women, Women of Colour, women with a disability, and women from the LGBTQIA+ community, disproportionately disadvantaged.”

Gaddi also says we need to broaden our focus beyond salary, and look at the other ways different groups of women are disadvantaged in the workforce.

“Employers typically invest less in First Nations Women and Women of Colour in terms of training for example, which impacts their career advancement and subsequently amplifies the socio economic inequality that women from marginalised and racialised communities face,” she says. 

For Gaddi, achieving gender equality is about more than gender. She wants us to take an intersectional approach at every level of the fight.

“The only way that transparency in gender pay gap will result in equality, is if we also disclose all the other factors and elements at play.”